Tasti D-Lite: Leader in Social Loyalty

Tasti D-Lite was an early leader in the location-based marketing and social loyalty space. TreatCard holders earn points on purchases. By registering a card online at MyTasti.com, a customer can link a Tasti D-Lite account to accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and foursquare. In doing so, they can easily share their Tasti experiences with friends and followers while earning extra rewards toward future purchases.

With a swipe of a TreatCard at the cash register, customers can automatically check in on foursquare while getting their Tasti fix. At the time of publishing, approximately 25 percent of customers were linking their TastiRewards accounts to at least one social network, with an average of over 90 friends or followers in each.

Tasti D-Lite also plans to eventually include unique coupon codes traceable back to the original check-in. For instance, a customer will be able to swipe his card at Tasti to automatically check in on foursquare while simultaneously pushing a coupon to other social networks. If 10 friends or followers subsequently redeem the coupon, that’s 10 extra loyalty points as a result — effectively taking word-of-mouth marketing to an entirely new level.

The foursquare app helps Tasti D-Lite employ location-based campaigns while providing opportunities to highlight specials to foursquare users who check-in, so users get great discounts via foursquare check-ins that other people aren’t privy to. It’s authentic and fun. The flip side is Tasti D-Lite gaining insights into consumer behavior.

BJ Emerson, VP Technology, emphasizes a completely new metric that he can now measure. He says that check-ins represent feet in the door as opposed to clicks, impressions, and other common online measurements.

This new metric includes total check-ins at a given location, deals redeemed from specials nearby, where people come from, messages pushed to Facebook and Twitter from within the location, and so on. These new data points offer a wealth of information for Tasti D-Lite to analyze. Click-through rates of specials nearby are near 40 percent with a check-in rate over 7 percent — which translates into feet in the door.

The value to Tasti D-Lite, according to BJ, is greater engagement with customers. New customers are acquired through nearby specials. Existing customer loyalty is encouraged through the TastiRewards/foursquare integration.